I’ve
been fascinated by the dark, lyric tautness of Marie Buck’s second poetry
collection, Portrait of Doom (San
Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2015), constructed as a book of short, fierce and
fiery poems around, among other subjects, disappointment. Consider the end of
the poem “LAY DOWN AMONG THE BODIES,” that writes: “This is the most moving
thing / I’ve seen in a while: / this glimmer of hope / embodied in a thrashing
stallion. // Err, fuck that, I feel all the chains upon me.” In her recent “12
or 20 questions” interview, she spoke on how hers is a poetry constructed via
collage, something that comes out occasionally through the poems themselves (“in
my own dark vision / alphabetizing in Word,” as she writes, in the poem “SCOPE
OF EMOTIONS”).

Krupskaya put out my
new book, Portrait of Doom, this past
spring. The projects are pretty different. One key difference, I think, is
that, while both projects are partially collaged, I’m not really interested in
the Internet with this new one. With the first, I was interested in publicity
and privacy, especially in relation to gender. I grabbed a lot of language from
MySpace accounts; the Internet at that moment was a really good thing to use in
thinking about the things I wanted to think about. Now, though, I feel pretty
uninterested in the Internet and also like we’re in a very different cultural
moment in the wake of Occupy and with the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement,
Greek resistance to austerity, the general uptick in resistance across the
globe.

So I guess I
want/expect my work to reflect this larger cultural shift. I’m really
interested in political affect, the transmission of political affect, and
moments of collective hope and disappointment. I’m drawing on broader range of
sources that I collage from (in addition to writing from scratch).

That said, all of my
work seems to wind up circling around a few things: power, the grotesque,
quotidian expressions of power relations, political and personal angst as one
and the same, bodies, over the top self-reflexivity on the part of the speaker.

The
construction of lyric collage allows Buck’s poems the possibility of being far
more open than the limitations of the lyric “I,” stretching out into territory
and contradictions and even a particular array of unexpected narrative
directions. And yet, the collage of her poems manage to go far deeper than what
the “I” would normally suggest, allowing her to thrust far and deep, cutting
away all the bullshit, and striking straight at the heart of the matter. Her poems
explore the failure of human possibility, including social, political and
personal, and yet, contain a vigorous, vocal and insistent optimism, pushing a
continual “fuck you” through the text, forcing its way up and out of some very
pessimistic observations. We are not yet there, her poems insist, and we might
never be, pushing her combination of resigned indignation and vigorous calls to
action. These poems want you to try, and try ever harder. How dare you not.